Tomlinson, email inventor, dies aged 74
Print Edition
RAY Tomlinson, the American programmer credited with inventing email in the 1970s and choosing the “@” symbol for the messaging system, died at the age of 74, his employer said on Sunday.
Tomlinson invented direct electronic messages in 1971. Before his invention, users could only write messages to others on a limited network.
“A true technology pioneer, Ray was the man who brought us email in the early days of networked computers,” his employer, the defense contractor and electronics giant Raytheon, said in a statement.
“His work changed the way the world communicates and yet, for all his accomplishments, he remained humble, kind and generous with his time and talents, he will be missed by one and all.”
A company spokesman said Tomlinson died on Saturday, and the cause of death was not yet confirmed.
Tributes poured in for the pioneer from the online world.
“Thank you, Ray Tomlinson, for inventing email and putting the @ sign on the map. #RIP,” Google’s Gmail team tweeted.
Vint Cerf, considered one of the fathers of the Internet who was once a manager of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, lamented the “very sad news” of Tomlinson’s passing.
When Tomlinson, a graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, invented the “user@host” standard for email addresses, it was applied at DARPA’s ARPANET, a US government computer network that is considered the Internet’s precursor.
He was the first to use the @ symbol in this way, to distinguish a user from its host.
At the time personal computers were virtually unknown, and the use of personal email — now a keystone of electronic communications — would not be adopted at a mass scale until the 1990s.
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